1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an ice lift apparatus for conveying or transporting vertically upwardly ice cubes of a substantially uniform shape such as rectangular prisms, cubes, that is prismatic ice blocks, particularly those made by an ice making machine among others.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In automatic ice making machines known heretofore, an ice storage box or chamber is provided with a front door for allowing ice cubes or blocks (hereinafter collectively referred to as ice cubes) to be taken out from the chamber by opening the front door. To this end, a scoop or the like tool is generally employed. However, not a little labor is imposed on the person in taking out the ice cubes although this depends on the position of the front door.
Under the circumstances, it has already been proposed to install an ice lift apparatus within the ice storage chamber with a view to making it possible to take out the ice cubes from the ice storage chamber through a delivery port provided at the top thereof. In that case, transportation of the ice cubes to the delivery or exit port is realized by using a conveyor apparatus (as disclosed in Japanese Utility Model Application Laid-Open No. 26162/1972) or a bucket elevator (as disclosed in Japanese Utility Model Application Laid-Open No. 77742/1973). As the conventional ice lift apparatus for transporting vertically upwardly the broken ice cubes which is employed in applications other than in ice making machines, there may be mentioned a screw type conveying apparatus (see Japanese Utility Model Application Laid-Open No. 130675/1981) and an ice scraping/feeding apparatus including a pair of endless conveyor members having a large number of raking means mounted thereon (refer to Japanese Patent Publication No. 11792/1985).
However, in a prior art ice transporting apparatuses in which conveyor means are made use of, not only are difficulties encountered in vertically transporting the ice cubes upwardly in a satisfactory manner but also a lot of space is required for installing the transporting apparatus. More specifically, in the case of an ice transporting apparatus in which the buckets or raking means are mounted on a pair of endlessly moving converyor chains, the buckets which project from the endless conveyor chains require additional room, making it difficult to install the ice lift apparatus within a narrow space such as in the ice storage chamber of an ice making machine.
It is further noted that although the prismatic ice cubes are in a normal state with relatively uniform size and shape immediately after having been made by the ice making machine, the ice cubes are likely to melt in the course of time even when the prismatic ice cubes are stored or accumulated within an ice storage chamber combined integrally with the ice making machine or in an ice storage box provided separately from the ice making machine. As a result, the size of the ice cubes is reduced with the shape becoming irregular and being transformed into so-called ice chips. Also, the prismatic ice cubes are rounded or cracked to ice pieces of irregular form or into ice chips under the influence of gravity by the weight of other ice cubes during storage or by forces acting on them during transportation. Additionally, the ice cubes tend to stick to one another to form a bonded ice block of elongated or enlarged size. These phenomena are well known in the art.
The ice chips, i.e. the ice pieces of irregular shape and reduced size, can certainly be used satisfactorily together with normal prismatic ice cubes for some applications such as cooling of fresh fish for the purpose of maintaining freshness or the like. However, a mixture of normal prismatic ice cubes and ice chips presents problems in some other uses. By way of example, in service industries such as hotels, restaurants and the like, drinks on the rocks, soft drinks, cooling beverages, etc. with ice cubes placed therein are often ordered by customers. In that case, if a large amount of the ice chips such as mentioned above are admixed, the customers may get the impression that there is some problem with the quality of the beverage itself.
For this reason, there exists a demand for supplying normal prismatic ice cubes by sorting out as much of the ice chips as possible. However, the prior art ice transporting apparatuses in which the conveyors, buckets or rakes are used can not satisfy the above-mentioned requirement because the ice chips are indiscriminately supplied with the normal ice cubes.